A Superior Death (28 page)

“He died on June seventeenth. Four days before the body was found. Five days before you were notified.”

Jo raised her chin slightly, her face set and stubborn.

“You must have known your husband was missing. You were just married, on your honeymoon, your husband disappeared and you didn’t report it. I mean to find out why.” Stanton waited perhaps ten seconds after the end of the speech, then pointed a long finger at Jo. “Break camp. Come in for questioning. Pilcher’s office, eight a.m. tomorrow.” He dropped his arm, turned, and marched down the trail toward Moskey Basin and the
Belle Isle.

“What an asshole!” Anna said. “Are you okay, Jo?”

Jo rose to her feet. The defiance had gone with Stanton’s departure. She looked tired to the point of exhaustion. “I can’t break camp now,” she said wearily. “I’m in the middle of things. It’ll shoot weeks of work. God!” She crumpled down, legs crossed tailor-fashion, and hid her face in her hands.

“Why didn’t you report Denny missing?” Anna asked gently.

Jo didn’t look, didn’t take her hands from her eyes. “I thought he was with Donna. If she’d given him the nod, he’d’ve come running. Even on my fucking wedding night.”

Anna sat on the rock, looked over the lake to give Jo a moment’s privacy. Denny and Donna: they could have run off together, left brides and husbands; could have turned up in a quickie-divorce court in Reno. But Denny had turned up dead, and Donna had gone missing.

“Don’t break camp quite yet,” Anna said. “No need to louse up your experiments. I’ll square it with Stanton.”

“Thanks. Work is what I’ve got now. It’s got to be right.”

She left Jo still sitting in the dirt hiding her face from her memories.

Anna almost stumbled over Frederick the Fed. His back against a fallen log, his long legs across the trail, he sat twenty feet or so down from Jo’s camp just out of sight behind a dense screen of vegetation.

“Jesus!”

“Interesting,” Frederick remarked. He levered himself up. “Sounded pretty convincing to me. What a drag. I knew there was a reason I’ve never married. I mean other than nobody’s ever asked me.”

Anna quickly recovered from being startled, but the entire situation had put her in a foul mood. Being used was an unpleasant sensation, one she was growing altogether too familiar with.

She struck off down the trail at a good clip, hoping to walk away from Stanton and his bag of tricks. Muttering and fussing, he bumbled along behind. Several times he turned on his idle chatter, the stuff Anna had come to suppose was designed to disarm the listener. She ignored it.

In less than an hour they reached the shoreline of Moskey. Seven P.M. and the shadows had yet to grow long. The
Belle Isle
sat quietly at the dock. The basin was still. A cold breeze from the lake shivered the grass near the tree line. Covering the finger of land between Moskey and Superior was a curtain of white fog.

A green fiberglass canoe was beached down from the dock, and a thin line of smoke, the color of the mist, curled up from the fire pit in front of the lean-to shelter. It pleased Anna that for once the place hadn’t been taken by power-boaters.

The shelter door opened, and a woman in a sweatshirt with a red hood stepped out. Blond hair frizzed, making a halo around her face. “Tinker!” Anna called.

Stanton came up behind her, so close she could feel the heat radiating from his body. The chill of the fog had reached the shore and the sensation would have been pleasant if Anna hadn’t considered the source.

“Friends?” Stanton asked, then: “Oh, it’s your Cannibal Jamboree folks.”

“You wait in the boat,” Anna commanded. Looking positively hangdog, Frederick shambled off down the beach toward the
Belle Isle.
Though the shore offered no cover, Anna watched him till he reached the dock. The lean-to backed up against the trees and she had had enough of Stanton’s false exits and surprise appearances for one day.

“I thought it must be you when I saw the
Belle,
” Tinker said as Anna walked up. “Damien’s gathering firewood. Where have you been?”

“Visiting Jo,” Anna replied. Uninvited, she sat down on the picnic table, her feet on the wooden bench. Stones were laid out creating a circle divided into three parts. Several small cloth bags, closed with drawstrings like old-time tobacco sacks, were scattered nearby. Anna picked one up and smelled it: a spice tea, orange and clove or cinnamon.

“Ah,” Tinker said apropos of nothing, and: “Okay, okay.” She went into the shelter. A moment later she reappeared with the stuffed bear in her hands and put him down on the table near Anna. The bear stared at her with interested button eyes.

“Oscar worries,” Tinker explained. “You are always putting yourself in places a body could get its fur wet.”

“I hope stress isn’t causing him to smoke too much,” Anna joked.

“It’s hard to tell,” Tinker replied in all apparent seriousness.

Anna laughed anyway and picked the bear up. She felt comforted. “I read somewhere hugging teddy bears reduces blood pressure and pulse rates.”

“It does.”

Anna kept Oscar on her lap. In Tinker’s world it was not a foolish thing to do, and she did not feel a fool for doing it. She watched as the other woman busied herself about the camp, feeding bits of wood into the fire, arranging metal pots on the grill. Tinker’s face was tight, her movements heavy as if she labored under great weariness. Clinical signs of depression: Anna remembered Molly ticking them off with her porcelain fingernails after Zach had died.

“You look like you could do with a little more hugging of bears,” Anna remarked. “Could it be you who’s keeping Oscar up nights worrying?”

“Oscar’s an old fusspot,” Tinker said affectionately.

“Who’s blackmailing you?” Anna asked abruptly.

Tinker’s hands, busy breaking beans into a pot of water, twitched. In a voice almost too low to be heard, Tinker said: “Nobody’s blackmailing me.”

“I read the cryptic note about Hopkins and dirty laundry,” Anna countered.

“I don’t know anything about that.” Tinker dragged her sleeve across her eyes.

“My mistake,” Anna apologized. “Like I said, the note was pretty cryptic.” She stayed a bit longer, fondling Oscar’s ears. The fog enveloped them. The
Belle Isle
took on a ghostly aspect. The land spit that held Moskey safe from the moods of the lake had vanished.

Finally Anna put the bear down and stood up. “Whatever it is, it can’t be that bad,” she said.

“Yes it can,” Tinker replied shortly.

Anna left her to whatever peace she could salvage for herself among her pots and pans and herbs.

 

 

 

Relying on radar, ragged green lines on a black screen taking the place of shoreline, the
Belle Isle
crept back up Moskey toward Rock. Stanton hummed old Donovan tunes. Anna kept her irritation to a tolerable level by reordering her thoughts. She’d decided she would share none of them with Frederick the Fed until he offered her something substantial in the way of information or insight.

With the Bradshaws and Jo out of the picture—at least in Anna’s mind, and she didn’t doubt that with the autopsy and time of death, alibis would be found—the investigation was back to square one. Back to the FBI’s drug death and Tinker and Damien’s Windigo. Denny and Donna; cocaine and cannibalism.

It would have been tragic, but simple, if Hawk and Holly had done it. Motive, means, opportunity: they’d seemed to have it all. The pieces had fit so nicely. But they’d been guilty only of loving Denny more than the law. And of incest.

The remaining possibilities each lacked one of the big three: motive or means or opportunity.

Jim Tattinger had the means: access to boats and dive gear, and he was a certified diver. The opportunity had been there. Jim was on the island that night. Anna had seen him at the reception. On the day before they were scheduled to recover the body, she had caught him running without lights near the dive site in a boat with full gear. He was clearly hoping to avoid detection. He was defensive at being stopped and questioned. Knowing the investigation was to begin in the morning, he could have been diving the
Kamloops
destroying evidence.

Motive was a little weak for Tattinger. Generalized dislike and professional squabbling seemed inadequate cause for such an elaborate and risky murder. Unless it stemmed from a deeper rift between the two men. Jim had left his job on St. John’s in the Caribbean under a considerable cloud. St. John’s was largely an undersea-oriented park. Had Jim been suspected of pilfering from any sunken archaeological site? Was he doing the same thing at ISRO? Did Denny suspect? Catch him at it? Pilfering what? The dive was so perilous any recovered artifact would have to be of considerable value. The
Kamloops
’s bill of lading showed no treasure. She was a package freighter; she carried pipe and shoes. Not a glamorous lady.

The most damning thing against Tattinger was Tattinger. He was a creep. Anna wanted him to be the guilty party. She smiled remembering a crusty old county sheriff telling her law enforcement class that most people were arrested because they were guilty of P.O.P.: pissing off the police.

“A ruble for your thoughts,” Stanton said.

“Not worth even a
glasnost
ruble,” Anna replied, glad her thoughts, at least, were not for sale. As children, she and Molly had fantasized endlessly about living in a telepathic world. As an adult the idea gave her chills. There were days, weeks, when the only real privacy to be had was inside one’s own skull.

Stanton began whistling “Sunshine, Superman.” Anna returned to her musings.

Scotty Butkus had motive: the classic—a cuckolded husband committing a crime of passion. He had opportunity: He was on the island that night. Means was the weak link in this chain. Though he had access to boats and dive gear, he was no diver. His health and, more important, his nerve had failed him. And Anna doubted he had the courage for a midnight dive. She doubted he could stay sober past six P.M. At depth, Dutch courage would kill him.

Casting about for other suspects, she considered Pilcher and Vega—both could do it but had no reason to. Blackmail? There was a blackmailer on the island but he was still in business. And, too, blackmail didn’t seem Denny’s style.

Patience had means, a boat—Hawk had even mentioned seeing it near the
Kamloops
’s marker buoy a time or two—and she had the gear. Much as she claimed to be a dilettante, Anna assumed that she could use it. She was on the island the night Denny was killed. It was motive that failed with Patience. She had liked and respected Denny. Where was the gain? Not inheritance. Not love.

A shadowy green blot the shape of Rabbit Island materialized on the radar screen. Mott was two islands farther up the channel. “Where can I drop you?” Anna asked.

Stanton was staying on Mott in the V.I.P. quarters. She docked the
Belle.
The FBI man learned quickly: He deployed fenders and secured lines like an old salt.

As she stepped onto the concrete pier, he shook her hand enthusiastically. “You’ve been a great help. Terrific!”

Anna didn’t feel particularly gratified at the commendation. “A flea in a flea circus can be prodded to jump through fiery hoops. It doesn’t make it a Flying Wallenda,” she said ungraciously.

“Nope, but it sure can make folks scratch.” Flapping the autopsy envelope he’d carried from the boat, he said gleefully: “Got a time of death. Now I can check alibis. I like doing alibis. Makes me feel sleuthy.”

The fog swallowed up his ambling form and muffled the crunch of his hard-soled shoes on the gravel.

Much of the day’s last light had been swallowed as well. Anna was cold and depressed. The
Belle Isle,
rocking gently on the wake of some passing boat, invisible forty yards out, was uninviting: a cluttered, damp, floating office. It was the end of a long hard day and she wanted nothing better than to go home. Wherever that was. Amygdaloid with marine radio, cobwebs, and single bed would have been a relief. Houghton with Chris and Ally and the cats, a pleasure. A double bed with Zachary, heaven.

“Cut that shit out,” Anna said aloud. In the fog, her voice sounded strange.

Laughter percolated incongruously through the cold mist. Trail crew. Or the maintenance men. Both had bunkhouses on Mott. Both drank enough vodka to qualify for detox on either coast. On the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where most of them hailed from, it was just a way to unwind, let off a little steam.

Scotty would be there no doubt, telling lies and opening beer bottles with his teeth to impress the new recruits. Dave would be eating the pepperoni pizzas he seemed to procure from nowhere. The TV would be blaring. Talk would be of outboard motors, dead fish, or female body parts. Still, needing heat and light, Anna gravitated toward the noise.

Pizza Dave was always good for a beer. If the sauna wasn’t booked she could retreat there with a couple of Leinenkugels, strip down, smell the sweet scent of cedar and feel the dry heat of the desert.

CHAPTER 19